New York Times - How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

[zanahoria]

How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/magazine/scotus-transgender-care-tennessee-skrmetti.html

https://archive.ph/MjbLL

very long read but well worth the time

As I said "Whittle was far more subtle and clever in helping getting the GRA through in 2004" not that Whittle did it alone. Whittle was a significant figure, who helped make the gender cause way more effective in the UK at that time and has been recognised as such. As being a key founder and Vice President of Press for Change in 1992 called "one of the most successful lobby groups seen in the last 25 years" we can't downplay the leadership role Whittle had. Obviously though there were others involved as well as Whittle would be the first to say.

Having watched the recent series of 'I Kissed a Boy'( which featured 'Lars' a transman who identified as a gay man)...of the many memorable moments and elements was that whilst all of the gay men, without exception, flaunted and played up their more glamorous, expressive 'feminine' selves ( camping it up).....dressing in glamorous and 'revealing' clothing, jewellery and make up and so on...it was clear that 'Lars' was trying to suppress and flatten out any elements of their own 'femininity' - in a very conscious and studied way.
Not only by dressing in an archetypically masculine way ( unlike all of the gay men) - but by clearly trying to overcome what looked like a natural, instinctive 'femininity' in their relationship with Ruben.

I think there’s also an element of being so bonkers, people will believe/accept it because it has to be true because no one would present something so insane otherwise.

Go hard or go home, and all that.

Considering the McBride/Klein interview again, it's remarkable the way the conversation electrifies a certain do-gooder class of the electorate that yearns for a righteous civil rights cause to get behind. (McBride couldn't resist the obligatory allusion to likening trans rights to rolling back Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s) From the comment section:

"'We are in a competition for pain, when there is plenty of pain to go around.' What a wonderfully articulate interview, there are so many well reasoned and poignantly delivered arguments. I am so impressed by Sarah.'

"The best and most intelligent and sensitive conversation I have listened to in years!"

"Within minutes I was like 'yeah I see why this person is good at politics'."

"Formidable emotional intelligence and intestinal fortitude to rein in primal instincts to fight those whose only purpose is to seek attention. "Intentionality of hope, principle and strategy are signs of strength"
Great conversation. Thank you, Sarah and Ezra."

"Sarah McBride is a brilliant and empathetic woman. I learned a lot in this conversation because of her openness and honesty."

I can't imagine many on this thread would be similarly touched by the conversation. But the appraisals are not exactly wrong. McBride did emote a lot: "pain", "hurt", "suffer", "oppression", "marginalization", "cruel", "hateful", "horrible", "grace", "miserable", "dehumanization", "decency" figured prominently.

As someone familiar with trans emotional blackmail, my own reaction is to find it all cringe. But to its target audience it's catnip, and McBride deploys those words skillfully. It's remarkable that barely any attention at all was given to the real core of the debate: women's right to exclude men from their spaces and to have services for themselves, the remodeling of language to replace sex with gender and striping women of the ability to use their own language to talk about themselves, prisons, the endless bullying and hatred TA pour on their opponents, the barest mention of trans medicalizion of children - no discussion and only in the barest euphemised language, trans homophobia and erasure of gays and lesbians.

How do talk about why the left 'lost on trans rights' when you don't even talk about what those supposed rights are (apart from existing) let alone make a case for them and discuss the potential compromised to make that case to the larger public? In fact this is the real failure of the left writ large - it's a vibes evacuated of substance.

The irony is that the case made is exactly the same as that made by the NRA or anti-vaxxers - “I have the right to live my life as I want and you can’t tell me what to do”.

It’s the American Dream.

Just on the vibes thing - anti-vax being coded as right-wing in the US is very recent and in some ways accidental. Demographically the two big vaccine hesitant groups are black men and white Republican men, who share a suspicion of government.

But among elites, the one place anti-vax has always been really strong is not among Republican elites but among Hollywood lefties. And, weirdly enough, often the very same celebrities who now have trans children.

I sometimes do a though experiment of what would have happened if the Pfizer vaccine had come out a few weeks earlier in 2020 - just before the election instead of just after. There's a good chance Trump would have won re-election, but leaving that aside, I'm convinced all these Jamie Lee Curtis types would have been all over social media telling people not to take the "Trump vaccine".

Hollywood is the dream factory!

If you can get everything else fixed, why not your sex?

Hollywood actors: you can totally change your sex

Also Hollywood actors: step away from that vaccine and buy my macrobiotic yogurt with pine kernels

This is interesting, because I narrowly agree with Romero - one of the problems with the 'omnicause' is that it's intersectional in a way that allows sister groups to coerce fellow members of their coalition and that it allows activists who don't have the best interests of the class they represent to speak for them in matters of national policy and dialog. Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than the force teaming of LGB with T. Each topic should be evaluated on its own merit.

Instead of what groups had been consulted, what should have been asked is whether the ACLU carefully considered the rights of women (and gays and lesbians) and what process did the ACLU follow to capture those voices and concerns and give them proper consideration?

The ACLU most definitely does have a mandate to protect the rights of women. But, as with everything the trans debate touches, the emotionally charged hysteria that engulfs each topic makes it impossible to even raise the possibility that there might be a competition of rights between women and trans identified men, let alone where that balance might lie.

How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

But this new ideology, I believed, was different. Like many gays and lesbians — and a majority of everybody else — I simply didn’t buy it. I didn’t and don’t believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with biology. My sexual orientation is based on a biological distinction between men and women: I’m attracted to the former and not to the latter. And now I was supposed to believe the difference didn’t exist?

https://archive.ph/AqDLU#selection-495.0-495.57

Another absolute belter of an article from the NYT, again very long, but I promise you it it is worth the time and effort

Really good essay.

I think the fundamental difference between gay rights and trans rights is that it is demonstrably possible for somebody to have a romantic and/or sexual same sex relationship, so the battle was about public acceptance.

Changing sex is not possible, so the battle is to impose an alternative reality.

What a very good article. Thanks for sharing

I agree but in the USA the waters have become very muddied and the debate about 'trans rights' has become polarized. The essay and similar voices are offering a way for the Democrats to row back from the hard line TWAW position. I particularly like the way he frames it as going back to a civil rights agenda

Thanks for posting! Andrew Sullivan is a great political writer and he was indeed an instrumental voice in arguing for gay marriage, so he knows what he's talking about. I'm 100% in agreement that the original sin of the woke left was the pivot to 'no debate'. The fact that an ideology that's so incoherent and absurd could accomplish so much through this kind of socially reinforced censorship is sinister.

I think what's also notable is the veiled warning that it will soon time for gays and lesbians to split with with the T and the old legacy advocacy institutions if the fanatics don't change course. In reality it's past time. And realistically I don't think there's any possibility that captured organizations are going to moderate. But no one so far, at the national level in the US, has publicly dared suggest a split. This is the first step in that direction, and perhaps even a shot across the bow. Having it published in the NYT will set off a shock wave.